Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Sculpture 2010 04
Sculpture 2010 04
sculpture
April 2010
Vol. 29 No. 3
A publication of the
International Sculpture Center
www.sculpture.org
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Phillip King
William Tucker
Leonardo Drew
Ceal Floyer
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Lifetime Achievement
in Contemporary
Sculpture Recipients
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Fletcher Benton
Louise Bourgeois
Anthony Caro
Elizabeth Catlett
John Chamberlain
Eduardo Chillida
Christo & Jeanne-Claude
Mark di Suvero
Richard Hunt
Phillip King
William King
Manuel Neri
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen
Nam June Paik
Arnaldo Pomodoro
Gio Pomodoro
Robert Rauschenberg
George Rickey
George Segal
Kenneth Snelson
William Tucker
sculpture
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Sculpture 29.3
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April 2010
Vol. 29 No. 3
A publication of the
International Sculpture Center
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34
Departments
Features
12 News
22
14 Itinerary
20 Commissions
80 ISC News
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34
40
46
Reviews
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The Scale of Perception: A Conversation with Katrn Sigurdardttir by Jan Garden Castro
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isc
I N T E R N AT I O N A L S C U L P T U R E C E N T E R
Executive Director Johannah Hutchison
Conference and Events Manager Dawn Molignano
Office Manager Denise Jester
Membership Coordinator Lauren Hallden-Abberton
Membership Associate Emily Fest
Web and Portfolio Manager Frank Del Valle
Conferences and Events Associate Valerie Friedman
Executive Assistant Kara Kaczmarzyk
Administrative Associate Eva Calder Powel
ISC Headquarters
19 Fairgrounds Road, Suite B
Hamilton, New Jersey 08619
Phone: 609.689.1051, fax 609.689.1061
E-mail: _________
isc@sculpture.org
SCULPTURE MAGAZINE
Editor Glenn Harper
Managing Editor Twylene Moyer
Editorial Assistants Elizabeth Lynch
Design Eileen Schramm visual communication
Advertising Sales Manager Brenden OHanlon
Contributing Editors Maria Carolina Baulo (Buenos
Aires), Roger Boyce (Christchurch), Susan Canning (New
York), Marty Carlock (Boston), Jan Garden Castro (New
York), Collette Chattopadhyay (Los Angeles), Ina Cole
(London), Ana Finel Honigman (Berlin), John K. Grande
(Montreal), Kay Itoi (Tokyo), Matthew Kangas (Seattle),
Zoe Kosmidou (Athens), Angela Levine (Tel Aviv), Brian
McAvera (Belfast), Robert C. Morgan (New York), Robert
Preece (Rotterdam), Brooke Kamin Rapaport (New
York), Ken Scarlett (Melbourne), Peter Selz (Berkeley),
Sarah Tanguy (Washington), Laura Tansini (Rome)
I N T E R N AT I O N A L S C U L P T U R E C E N T E R C O N T E M P O R A R Y S C U L P T U R E C I R C L E
The International Sculpture Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization
that provides programming and services supported by contributions, grants,
sponsorships, and memberships.
The ISC Board of Directors gratefully acknowledges the generosity of our members
and donors in our Contemporary Sculpture Circle: those who have contributed
$350 and above.
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Isaac Witkin
Tate
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Isaac Witkin
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Sculpture Magazine
Published 10 times per year, Sculpture is dedicated to all forms of contemporary
sculpture. The members edition includes the Insider newsletter, which contains
timely information on professional opportunities for sculptors, as well as a list
of recent public art commissions and announcements of members accomplishments.
www.sculpture.org
The ISCs award-winning Web site <www.sculpture.org> is the most comprehensive
resource for information on sculpture. It features Portfolio, an on-line slide
registry and referral system providing detailed information about artists and their
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Education Programs and Special Events
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news
Bchel vs. Mass MoCA Round Two
A federal appeals court recently overturned a 2007 lower court
decision in the case of Christoph Bchel versus Mass MoCA (News,
September 2007). The U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that a
federal district judge should have applied the Visual Artists Rights
Act of 1990, which protects artists in the event of a distortion,
mutilation or other modification of the work, to Bchels unfinished
Training Ground for Democracy. This ambitious collaboration with
Mass MoCA turned contentious soon after work began in 2006.
Bchel claimed that the museum mishandled the project, making
construction and aesthetic decisions without his approval; Mass
MoCA countered that the artist was frequently absent during the
(extended) installation period and demanded budget-doubling
changes. Forced to cancel the show, Mass MoCA sued Bchel in
2007 and won the right to display the unfinished work, which it dismantled after negative responses. The appeals court ruling cites evidence that would permit a jury to find that the museum forged
ahead with the installationknowing that the continuing construction in Bchels absence would frustrateand likely contradict
[his] artistic vision. The three-judge panel also referred to material
disputes of fact that should be decided by a jury, a course that
Bchel may pursue. Sergio Sarmiento, associate director of Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, which assisted in Bchels appeal, told the
New York Times that their plan is to litigate this to the fullest extent
possible. Mass MoCA maintains that it exercised appropriate curatorial care and diligence in [the] handling of the work in progress.
Newsbriefs
More than 20 newly digitized resources related to Henry Moore have recently been
released on-line. Collected by the BBC and the Henry Moore Foundation, the documentaries, interviews, and reports span nearly five decades and include six classic
BBC programs made by John Read, whose Henry Moore: Art is the Expression of
Imagination and Not the Imitation of Life follows the creation of Reclining Figure
(1951) from sketch to final bronze. The Moore material can be accessed through
the BBCs archive <www.bbc.co.uk/archive> and the Henry Moore Foundation
<www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk>. Selections are also on view at Tate Britains Moore
retrospective (through August 8) and at <www.tate.org.uk>.
As we go to press, Anish Kapoor is set to win a hushed competition for a 15 million sculptural icon to brand the 2012 London Olympics (funded by steel magnate
Lakshmi Mittal). His 400-foot asymmetrical tower (six times taller than Gormleys
Angel of the North and twice as high as Mark Wallingers horse planned for north
Kent) comes with elevators and sweeping views and again pairs Kapoor with structural engineer Cecil Balmond. Their previous collaborations include Marsyas for Turbine Hall and the Tees Valley Giants, a series of five monumental works underway in
the towns of Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, and
Stockton on Tees. The first, Temenos, is scheduled for completion later this month.
When finished, the five Giants will become the worlds largest public artwork.
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NOGUCHI MUSEUM SCULPTURE GARDEN: GEORGE HIROSE, COURTESY THE NOGUCHI MUSEUM, NY
Sculpture 29.3
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mirages that slip in and out of solidity like memories and associations
slip in and out of the mind.
Tel: 212.980.4575
Web site
<www.publicartfund.org>
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden
Coral Gables, Florida
Yayoi Kusama
Through May 30, 2010
Kusama first gained recognition in
the 60s by advocating social transformation through happenings, performances, and installations. She
was soon at the forefront of Pop art,
with soft sculptures and clothes
featuring food-based imagery and
room-size installations covered
in eye-popping rhythmical patterns.
The psychedelic optics continue in
her large-scale outdoor worksvivid
and playful, botanically inspired
forms that find a perfect home in
the Fairchilds exotic, tropical paradise. This showinga surreal
garden within the real garden
features a group of her classic
Pumpkins, a new sculptural ensemble called Flowers that Bloom at
Midnight, and a multi-part floating
work conceived for a pond.
Tel: 305.667.1651
Web site
<www.fairchildgarden.org>
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HOLZER: VASSILIJ GUREEV, 2010 JENNY HOLZER, MEMBER ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY / LIN: ARTS CLUB OF CHICAGO, COURTESY PACEWILDENSTEIN, NY / COFFIN: JAMES EWING, COURTESY PUBLIC ART FUND / KUSAMA: COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY, NY
itinerary
Sculpture 29.3
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OKA DONER: COURTESY DONER STUDIO / WHITEREAD: COURTESY TATE MODERN / TROUV: DANIELE RESINI / CLAYDON: ANDY KEATE
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Above: Michele Oka Doner, Root System. Top right: Rachel Whiteread, Study
(Blue) for Floor. Right: Tatiana Trouv,
Untitled. Far right: Steven Claydon, Won
From Coarseness, from Golden Times.
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Malm Konsthall
Malm, Sweden
Hans-Peter Feldmann
Through May 2, 2010
Feldmann, whose casual inventories
of ordinary things have influenced
two generations of European artists,
creates elegantly spare installations,
sculptures, books, photographs, and
paintings that illuminate the mysteries of daily life. Sifted through
a conceptual sieve, his collected
images and objectswhether massproduced or artist-generated
re-present the vernacular, the amateur, the ephemeral, and the unattended, bringing order and understanding to bear on a cacophony of
visual trivia. This exhibition includes
a wide range of work, including the
recent Schattenspiel (2002) in which
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FREY: MICHAEL TROPEA, CHICAGO, ARTISTS LEGACY FOUNDATION/LICENSED BY VAGA, NY / NETO: OREN SLOR, COURTESY TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NY / HLLER: ATTILIO MARANZANO, COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY, LONDON / FELDMANN: COURTESY MALM KONSTHALL
itinerary
Sculpture 29.3
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THATER: ALAN SMITHEE FOR DIANA THATER, COURTESY HAUSER & WIRTH, LONDON AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NY / MATTA-CLARK: FRANCOIS ROBERT, ESTATE OF GORDON MATTA-CLARK/ARTIST RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY / PLENSA: WILLIAM J. HEBERT, COURTESY FREDERIK MEIJER GARDENS & SCULPTURE PARK,
GRAND RAPIDS, MI
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Tate Britain
London
Henry Moore
Through August 8, 2010
Recent Moore exhibitions have
parsed his in-depth knowledge of
natural materials and forms, his
treatment of the figure and abstraction, and his architectural sense of
space. This show, the largest selection of his work to be assembled in
a generation, takes a much more
comprehensive approach, with 150
works focusing on the radical,
experimental, and sometimes darkly
charged underpinnings of Britains
most-championed sculptor. In the
wake of World War I, Moores works
expressed new ideas about the
human body and human psychology,
reflecting the rise of psychoanalysis
(with its sexual obsessions) and
growing public anxiety over the
traumas of war. Carvings from the
1920s and 30s, including iconic
mother and child groups, drawings
of Londoners sheltering from the
Blitz, and the celebrated 1950s and
60s abstractions reflect the
humanitarian anguish and political
uncertainty at the heart of the 20th
century.
Tel: + 44 20 7887 8008
Web site <www.tate.org.uk>
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FITCH: STEVEN LAZEN / KAPOOR: ANISH KAPOOR / MOORE: DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION
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HUTCHINS: DAN KVITKA, COURTESY SMALL A PROJECTS, NY, AND DEREK ELLER GALLERY, NY / WHITE: FREDRIK NILSEN, COURTESY GREENGRASSI, LONDON AND 1301PE, LOS ANGELES
itinerary
Top: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Couch For a Long Time. Above: Pae White,
Smoke Knows. Both from the Whitney Biennial.
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Sculpture April 2010
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commissions
FoRM Associates
Northala Fields
London
Left and detail: FoRM Associates, Northala Fields, 200309. Clean demolition
Dean Chatwin
Propagate
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
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FORM ASSOCIATES
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Steven Siegel
Two of em
Reading, PA
Leading a team of 16 volunteers for four
days, Steven Siegel recently created Two
of em, a pair of outdoor sculptures made
of bamboo and recyclables on the campus
of Penn State Berks. Siegel, whose work
is often fabricated from natural materials
and waste products, approached the project without a precise concept, more interested in negotiating the constraints of
materials, volunteer help, and time available to him on campus. Marilyn Fox, the
Juries are convened each month to select works for Commissions. Information on recently
completed commissions, along with quality 35mm slides/transparencies or high-resolution digital
images (300 dpi at 4 x 5 in. minimum) and an SASE for return of slides, should be sent to:
Commissions, Sculpture, 1633 Connecticut Avenue NW, 4th Floor, Washington, DC 20009.
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A Life
in
Sculpture
BY BARNABY WRIGHT
In 1960, Phillip King returned to London from a trip to Greece, cleared the
entire contents of his studio, repainted it from top to bottom, and started
afresh. The work that he made over the next three years helped to revolutionize British sculpture and announced him as one of the most important and radical sculptors of his generation. The eight works shown at his first one-man
exhibition in London in 1964 have now become icons of modern British sculpture, notably Declaration (1961), Rosebud (1962), Genghis Khan (1963), and
Tra-La-La (1963). Their daring and strident originality is undimmed to this day,
just as King hoped it would be: I want people to stand aghast for a second,
and I hope theyll do it again and again with my best work.1 These extraordinary sculptures were just the beginning. Each decade since has brought new
works of exceptional vitality and innovation, from joyful masterpieces in brightly
painted steel, such as Dunstable Reel (1970), to the raw materiality of pieces
like Tracer (1977), and on to a new flowering of color in his recent work, epitomized by Sun Roots II (2008). For more than half a century, King has forged
ahead with an unwavering commitment to extending the expressive possibilities of sculptural form. He has continually explored new materials and processes,
testing the traditions of sculpture while challenging and redefining the successes
of his past work. Kings contribution to modern art is celebrated this year with
a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center.
Kings memories of his childhood in Tunis, where he was born in 1934, are of
hunting for Roman coins around Kheredine, near Carthage. Instead he found a
large vein of clay and used it to model animal figurines, which he sold to family
and friends. He came to London with his family shortly after World War II and
later spent a formative year in Paris as part of his National Service. He traces
his love of sculpture to time spent in the Louvre and the experience of running
his hands over an ancient Greek marble carving of a womans torso to try and
understand its subtlety and power: I knew instinctively that there was more
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Left: Rosebud, 1962. Plastic, 152.5 x 183 x 183 cm. Above: Spring-a-Ling,
1983. Steel plate, mesh, steel cable, and chain, 195.5 x 216 x 138.5 cm.
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LEFT: COURTESY NEW ART CENTRE, ROCHE COURT, SALISBURY, WILTSHIRE, U.K. / RIGHT: COURTESY BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY, LONDON
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TOP: COURTESY NEW ART CENTRE, ROCHE COURT, SALISBURY, WILTSHIRE, U.K. / CENTER: JONTY WILDE
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Above: Reel 3, 1969. Mild steel, sprayed and stove-enameled zinc, approximately 257 x 500 x 340 cm.
Below: Ascona, 1972. Painted mild steel, 231 x 457 x 457 cm.
Above: Shogun, 1980. Wood and steel, 216 x 254 x 188 cm.
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Still Life with Moon, 1998. Plastic and nao paper, 42 x 35 x 18 cm.
Notes
1 King quoted in Norbert Lynton, Latest Developments in British Sculpture, Art and Literature 1964: No. 2.
2 Interview with the author, 2009.
3 King quoted in Charles Harrison, Phillip King Sculpture 196068, Artforum December 1968.
4 King quoted in Lynn Cooke, The Sculpture of Phillip King, 196972, unpublished MA thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1978.
5 Interview with the author, op. cit.
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OPPOSITE: COURTESY MCKEE GALLERY, NY / THIS PAGE: COURTESY MARTIN Z. MARGULIES COLLECTION, MIAMI
William
Tucker FROM THE FORMAL
TO THE PRIMEVAL
BY DAVID COHEN
William Tucker is a sculptor whose work and conduct embody the conscience
of his medium. There is a pervasive sense, in all he doesin his widely influential writings about sculpture as well as in the work itselfof agitated industry,
whether he is striving to define, to eliminate, to amass, or to complicate.
Radical shifts in his way of working indicate an almost existential search for
the essence of sculpture, and an equally strident defense of it.
There is often a palpable tension between complexity and singularity in
Tuckers work: one senses both a determination to force materials or processes
to yield their maximum and, in a competing direction, to give expression to
a particular emotion or insight. A similar dichotomy, a bracing of extremes,
carries across to a consideration of his career as a whole, for Tuckers journey over 50 years of sculptural activity has taken him from one resolute stylistic and procedural position to another.
His life has traversed comparable terrain. A Briton, born in Egypt and raised
in England and Ireland, he moved mid-way through his career first to Canada
and then to the United States, where he is now a citizen. The Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed on Tucker by the International Sculpture Center throws
into relief the striking disparity between his mature achievements in one center and the next. Take a representative piece from his English period, one
of his Cats Cradle series of steel rod constructions (1971), for instance,
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the new world, he reconnected with European tradition, in particular with a French
sculptural aesthetic that he had kept at a
certain theoretical distance. Tuckers land-
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Above: Four Part Sculpture 1, 1993. Painted fiberglass, 91.5 x 228.6 x 228.6 cm. Left: Greek Horse,
2003. Bronze, 56 x 42 x 24 in.
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One way to reconcile the cerebral, optical, linear Tucker of the British period and
the hefty, earthy, neo-romantic humanist
he has become in America is to stress, in
place of look, feel, working method, or subject, the strenuousness of inquiry. It is as if
he needed to deal with the essence of the
medium exhaustively in order to then move
beyond the language of sculpture and give
shape to equally essential human experiences. Tucker gave evidence that the same
man was at work in both continents and
paradigms in a statement that he made to
Norbert Lynton in 1977, saying that he
wanted to speak a human rather than an
art language.
It should be acknowledged that personal
crisis as well as changes in location and
ambition helped to move Tuckers work in a
radically new direction. In Canada, he witnessed the demise of his first marriage and
a period of serious illness. His marriage to
the American expressionist painter Pamela
Avril, whom he met at Bennington College
in 1979, also had bearing on his development. Additionally there was a crucial, transitional body of work, made between the
old world and the new, whose open forms
recall his linear abstraction but whose
robust finish and rough materials speak of a
new drama and earthiness. The House of
the Hanged Man (1981), a pitched structure in found wood, takes its sinister title
from a Czanne painting of 1873. The
brooding, existentialist titles of this period,
such as those derived from Kafka, The Prisoner and Portrait of K, resonated with his
desire to reconnect his work with social
experience rather than abstract phenomena.
Tuckers 1970s open forms are also
defined by his characteristic inclusion of
protruding (often intruding) spokes. Building a Wall in the Air, for instance, is made
up of joined bench forms of mild steel
whose legs dig into the negative space of
the sculptures interior. These forms,
in turn, would beget the individual furniture-like objectsfigures almostin one
of Tuckers early series in bronze, the Guardians (1983). The bronze forms initially
grew from his process of roughly applying
plaster to wooden structures to create an
animated surface. The limb-like extensions
in the Guardians became more forcibly
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TOP: COURTESY NEW ART CENTRE, ROCHE COURT, SALISBURY, WILTSHIRE, U.K. / BOTTOM: STEVE RUSSELL, COURTESY PANGOLIN, LONDON
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TOP: STEVE RUSSELL, COURTESY PANGOLIN, LONDON / BOTTOM: COURTESY MCKEE GALLERY, NY
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embodied in the Gymnasts of the following year, a series inspired by watching the
Los Angeles Olympics on television, and, of
course, an homage to Degas.
Tuckers move to time-hallowed materials
and his reconnection with humanist subject
matter coincided with a 1980s resurgence
of figuration and expressionism. His dealer,
David McKee, wrote in a catalogue preface
in 1987 that in naming new sculptures after
gods and Titans, Tucker had self-evidently
rejected a Modernist interpretation and
moved closer to more classical concepts of
sculpture. The return to myth, besides connecting with the transavanguardia of other
transplanted Europeans, recalls the classicism of an early rappel lordre like that
of Picasso, Cocteau, and Stravinsky in the
1920s. But there is nothing effete about
Tuckers bronzes since the 1980s. On the
contrary, they are brutal, blunt, hefty, and
primordial. Seeing an exhibition of his
bronzes from this period at the Ward Pound
Ridge Reservation, for instance, in Cross
River, New York, in 2007, the sensation was
far closer to chancing upon a circle of prehistoric dolmen than a classical ruin. Tellingly, Tucker was drawn in his titling to the
pre-Olympian pantheon of Thetys, Okeanos,
the Dactyls, Ouranos, and Gaia, more
archetypal deities than the Olympians who
followed them.
Tuckers bronzes meander in and out of
legibility. Some are lumpen masses that
defy efforts to pin them down, though their
general shape and the wealth of surface
ambiguity betoken bodiliness, even if
a given part cannot be named. Others, like
his extensive Horse series (198687) or
his Philosophers (1989), are relatively
specific in how they are to be read. But
even at their most elegiac, Tuckers sculptures are unforgivingly difficult. They are
often almost oppressively big works; even
when he occasionally produces hand-sized
maquettes, the invested energy ensures a
sense of the monumental. They connect to
a fascination with Rodin that leaves behind
the polite formalism in Tuckers 1960s
analysis of the master to insist, instead,
on the primeval.
As much as the archetypal and heroic
romantic Rodin, it is the fragmentary
and ambiguous, deconstructive Rodin that
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Leonardo
Drew
Epic Mythologies
of Detritus
BY REBECCA DIMLING COCHRAN
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120 x 4 in.
Sculpture 29.3
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ANSEN SEALE
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BY LILLY WEI
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Above: Taking a Line for a Walk, 2008. Lawn-marking paint, installation view. Right: Wish you were
TOP: COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LISSON GALLERY, LONDON / BOTTOM: COURTESY 303 GALLERY, NY
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sized tree, the heads of viewers just skimming the lowest branches when they
passed in front of it. The title is, as usual,
literal, although again, as a giant nature
morte or inflated image weighted with
multiple meanings, it perhaps includes
a critique of overgrown biennials. From
there, it leads into other ideological and
perceptual territory; it is both a tree and
not a tree. Floyer once said that theres a
fine line between something making poetic
sense of itself and becoming a short circuit,
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A Conversation with
BY MICHAL AMY
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TOP: ROBERT WEDEMEYER, COURTESY MARC SELWYN FINE ART, LOS ANGELES / BOTTOM: COURTESY THE ARTIST
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Above: Monopoly, 2007. Unfired clay, paint, and ink, 38.5 x 37 x 1.5 in. Below: Installation view with
Piano Forte, 2004, unfired clay, wood, wire, and salt, 72.5 x 46 x 97 in.; and Topolino, 2003, unfired
clay, wood, and wire, 51 x 48 x 102 in.
my skills and my faults. I like that my shortcomings are apparent in the objects that I
make. There are often precisely crafted parts next to parts that are put together with duct
tape and thread, that rely more on luck and balance to stay in place than on anchors
and adhesives. I often get asked how I make things. People are usually disappointed
with the I-use-my-intuition answerworking without plans, diagrams, preliminary
drawings, photographs, or molds seems far too daring. The truth is that I do not have the
patience to make plans before I make things. I find the making of molds to be too timeconsuming; additionally, molds give results that are far too predictable and boring for
my taste. I would rather just get to work and find out how I can arrive at what I am
after. I invent ways of working as I go along. I occasionally use actual things as models.
When I made cars, I visited car shows and looked at pictures in books. When I was
working on the cellos, I found that it was more helpful to listen to music than to look at
instruments. In my most recent works, I try to re-create old paperback books. I am trying
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Mighty Mouse and Popeye, 2006. Unfired clay, wood, wire, and paint, installation view.
to create human as opposed to mechanical copies of specific books that I own or covet.
Lately, it has been helpful to have the actual book that I am trying to re-create.
MA: Which sculptors do you admire?
KM: I like Ed Kienholz and Tim Hawkinson. But to be quite honest, the inspiration for my
work comes not from sculpture but from sources that may have nothing to do with art.
MA: Your work implies narrative. Are we supposed to imagine a story that would explain
the forlorn state of the two life-sized clay cars you keep in your garage, that look as if they
had been retrieved from the water, or set afire, following a murder or heist?
KM: A lot of people like to imagine these kinds of narratives when they see my work,
but I dont. I think that the objects are what they are. There is plenty there to investigate
and discover without having to invent stories.
MA: Tell me more about the cars.
KM: To date, I have made four life-sized carsnot including a childs pedal-car that I made
in 2006. Car culture is extremely important in L.A.thats why cars appear in my work.
The first car I made was a Cadillac, back in 2001. I was interested in its majestic quality.
Nine people can sit in a Cadillac. It has a miraculous, unbelievable quality. A Cadillac
was a real status symbol; now, its the exact opposite. I wanted to make the Cadillac
appear as if it were disintegrating. It was, in fact, disintegrating quite a bit because
at the time I knew very little about building large-scale sculpture. The second car I built
was the Topolino in 2003. In 2004, I built my second Cadillac, which was based on a
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TOP: ROBERT WEDEMEYER, COURTESY MARC SELWYN FINE ART, LOS ANGELES / BOTTOM: COURTESY THE ARTIST
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Top: Installation view of objects for everyone I have known, 2008. Left detail: Bunny Cups, 2006. Unfired clay, paint, ink, marker, and ceramic cup, 4.5 x
8.5 x 4 in. Right detail: Bodies in Bedlam, 2008. Unfired clay, paint, ink, marker, and paperback, 7 x 8 x .5 in.
paint, and they will not last. The drawings sometimes fade. Both the original and my fabricated counterparts will fail. I am also trying to make art for everyone I have ever
known. I like the idea of the gift. I am in close proximity to people on a daily basis
but dont have solid interactions with them. So, while I make gifts for these people,
I find a moment to think of them. It makes me feel better about making things.
Michal Amy is an art historian and a frequent contributor to Sculpture.
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Jan Garden Castro: What was the origin of your recent series of works?
Katrn Sigurdardttir: In 2007, when I was preparing for an exhibition called
Megastructure (2008), I revisited subjects that had interested me in the late
1990s. I was introduced to the work of Archigram in the early 90s with their
seminal exhibition at ThreadWaxing Space in New York; ever since, I have been
fascinated by speculative architecture and engineering, futuristic and psychedelic solutions to urban problems. A megastructure is a mega-building or built
network that serves as a platform or framework for buildings of more conventional scale and utility. I built an eight-foot-tall model of such a structure, a
building with six artificial landscape-levels. It was a direct spin-off from the
designs of the Hungarian-French architect Yona Friedman. In many ways, this
was a singular piece for me, because as a sculpture, it behaves more like
an architectural model than almost any other work that I have shown in the
past 10 years. It doesnt have the typical doublesided-ness of my other minia-
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tures, which draw attention to how the work is perceived and create an ambiguous perceptive territory between the work as a sculptural object and as a model, thereby complicating
the viewers relationship to it. But it is akin to numerous other works in that it doesnt propose a structure or a space so much as it posthumously describes it. It appears more like
a dystopic ruin, a memorial to modernistic prospects, and in that, points both to the future
and the pastthe future that became the past before it ever came to be buildable.
The show at Greenberg Van Doren took this work as a departure point. Although all of
the works in the show were new, completed in 2008 and 09, there was a retrospective
intent in their making, i.e., looking back to my work of the last 10 years and processing
it. The show consisted of four objects that attempt to articulate a lineage from works
such as the Haul series to Megastructure.
This lineage goes from the mega-shelves of a utopian urban plan to a landscape, segmented, contained in a cabinet, and hence related to furniture or antiquated museum
display cases, to a place envisioned and packed in a box. In a tangent off this line, the
small stacked cityscape on a no-tricks white pedestal references Friedman and his
elaboration on vertical expansions in urban space. It is also a reference to the vertical
layering of old cities, with new towns built literally on the ruins of the old, as revealed
through archaeological excavations. All of the works in the show are boxes: the megastructure as the box around the city, the cabinet as a box around land as an ownable
entity, the crate that contains the mountain as an artifact, and the white pedestal as
the classic gallery furniture that white-balances and serves as a social reference point.
All of the works also show a kind of impossible layering of terrains, one on top of the
other, layering by design, layering by time, layering through objectification.
JGC: What is the origin of the stacked and shelved mountains?
KS: In 2002, I visited the Egyptian Museum in Turin, a beautiful museum not only for its
holdings but also for its antiquated displays. That same year, I placed landscapes in vitrines, similar to those I had seen in the museum. The stacked landscape has a reference
to this work. It consists of heavily segmented terrain that when installed together looks
much like a game board, but it divides into 24 panels, which then divide further into three
units that resemble the inner structure from a chest of drawers or a cabinet. Each cabinet is an individual work. Like Odd Lots (2005) and Haul 2005 (2005), this work comments
on segmentation, ownership, and conquest, both of land and of art.
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The Green Grass of Home, 1998. Plywood, hobbymodeling materials, canvas, and hardware,
installation view.
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KS: That show was a more distilled, abstracted statement. One large installation filled
the entire gallery. The work is an outside-in white cube, so an inversion of the gallery
space or a doubling of the space in a slightly shrunken scale, depending on how you see
it. The two elements in this cube, twin objects, one in full scale and the other in miniature,
are modeled on the small stations of royal guards. These single-body chambers are usually
placed by a palace entrance, and these two are based on the guard stations outside
the Royal Palace in Copenhagen. It is interesting that these stations are not fixed to the
ground; instead, they have floors and legs similar to those of a large wardrobe, so they
are somewhere between architecture and furniture. They are part of a faade and, of particular interest to me, a structure for single-body surveillance and control.
The relationship between the viewer and the work is always important to me, and most
of my work with scale only becomes activated by the viewers presencethe uncomfortable
confrontation between the perceptive scale of the miniature and the scale of the body and
the architecture that contains it. As in High Plane, this installation is a device for perception,
a dual perception, a controlled view of that which is on the other side of the white
cube, something in a surreal scale in proportion to the viewer. But here, the body is always
invisible, erased behind the mirror, which both blocks and expands the view. In this work,
I am trying to take on the limits between in and out, interior and exterior, inclusion and
exclusion, visibility and projection. The guarded palace is obscurely related to the exhibition
space, the gallery, the museum. The life being guarded, that of the artist, is invisible, yet
it is present in the empty space surrounding the work, within the actual gallery walls.
JGC: Does the work address current problems in Iceland and the rest of the world?
KS: My process as an artist does not directly address current events in Iceland. It would
simply be opportunistic. I talk a lot about whats happening, and that is the most suitable medium. Social issues, issues of identity, power, and nationality, are very much at
the foundation of my work however obscure they may be. There are many narrative possibilities. For instance, people have read my work in an eco-political contexta reading
pertaining to global capitalism and the exploitation of natural resources seems warranted.
However, no one reading is more correct or appropriate than any other. Its all what
the viewer brings to the work.
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Jan Garden Castro is a Contributing Editor for Sculpture living in New York.
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Loose Ends
A Conversation with
Tariq Alvi
London-based Tariq Alvi is quick to admit his penchant for pop culture. He recycles riotous
effigies from advertisements, pornography, and consumer magazines in his installations,
often reconfiguring them into collages. Through his paper-based art, Alvi meticulously digests
generic and overlooked icons of our disposable culture, visually calling for a re-appraisal
of material worth. He has also mastered trompe loeil with cut-out paper, which he cunningly
manipulates in homage to consumerism, civic conflict, and the elusive dual nature of desire
and reward. His delicate dissections and re-assemblies exalt the ambiguities of politics, social
belonging, and the authenticity of personal possession, leaving the viewer to decide questions
of value.
Alvi has exhibited from Shanghai to London to New York City and in San Francisco at 2nd
Floor Projects in 2008. In 2006, he was represented at the Frieze Art Fair by both Cabinet,
London, and Diana Stigter Gallery, Amsterdam. Earlier in the decade, he exhibited back-toback solos at the Gate Foundation in Amsterdam (2000) and Whitechapel Art Gallery in
London (2001). Last year, his work was shown in solo exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery in
London and the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe.
Joli Reichel: How long have you focused on paper-based installations, and what keeps you
interested in this medium?
Tariq Alvi: I started, more or less, in 1990. I like the idea that paper is all around us. For
example, we get things through the post, flyers and circulars, which are eventually discarded.
But paper can be re-used, recontextualized, and have its life and meaning extended and
pushed further. In the early 90s, I started working on various techniques of cutting, tearing,
pulping, and pinning paper. I wanted to give it a second life and transform it beyond being
passively consumed or received.
JR: Your work approaches themes of consumerism
Above: The Meaning, 2009. Mixed media,
and materialism. How does your choice of paper
installation view. Left: Dyslexic Dancer,
as a medium connect to this?
2009. Mirror, glass, and collaged magazine
TA: Paper is used by commerceits used to sell
cuttings, 102 x 119.5 x 295 cm.
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of life, what we value, and how human beings can be turned into objects or
things by the actions of other human beings. A living being can have his or her
life extinguished by mechanical means and be turned into a hanging piece of
material. I wanted to address the banal brutality and coldness of this act.
This contrasted with another piece, Matter to Matter (2008), which was
made of collaged shapes using a London gay listings magazine called QX, a
free magazine one sees in bars and clubs. I took one entire issue, tore it into
small pieces, and used all of the material to make colored elements based on
pattern, sympathetic color, and shape. I then pinned and nailed them directly
to the wall. Opposite this wall, I hung a copy of the magazine, a work titled QX
International (2008). Thus you see two forms of the same thing, two manifestations of the same material. I saw the pieces pinned to the wall as a
release of the spirit or potential energy contained within the intact magazine.
JR: What are some of your influences?
TA: Flix Gonzlez-Torres, Warhol, certainly Pop art, and I must admit, television. Youre always seen as being really dumb if you say that you are influenced by television, but I think television is fantastic. Im influenced by filmmaker David Lynch. I love that weird, very bizarre way of thinking when
some things presented arent rational. I like things that arent tied together
into a clear narrative. Im all for loose ends and unanswered questions,
because I think it is more truthfulin my life, anyway.
Joli Reichel is an arts writer based in Philadelphia.
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EVERYDAY MONUMENTS
Jean Shin
A Conversation with
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BY SARAH TANGUY
Known for her labor-intensive installations of everyday accumulations, Jean Shin broke new ground in
Everyday Monuments, a commission begun in 2007
at the invitation of Joanna Marsh, curator of contemporary art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
in Washington, DC. Conceptually, the installation
added elements of narrative and a national scope to
Shins interest in community participation, while it
met the challenges of working in a miniature scale.
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JS: The narrative aspect was heightened in this work, in part because of the nature of
trophies and the site. Its the first figurative installation that Ive ever engaged in. Thats
an interesting topic of discussion in my work, because I think of my cast-offs as surrogates
or group portraits of the community. Although my past works are abstract, they metaphorically represent the figure in many different guises. In Everyday Monuments, Im literally transforming the human body in sculpture. Unlike lottery tickets or umbrellas, the
trophies are donations from specific people who are represented and memorialized in this
work. This exchange with my audience and donors has been particularly meaningful.
ST: I also see a reference to classical sculptures like the Discobolus.
JS: Everyday Monuments evokes my earlier interest in classical sculpture from the
Parthenon friezes and in Rodin. I thought of the grand compositions, the multitude of
figures frozen in action and embedded into the architecture. All around Washington,
you see references to classical sculpture and architecture. I was also thinking about
works that came out of social realism, the New Deal, the WPAdepictions of the American workforce. Instead of the usual conversation about post-Minimalism, I revisited my
love of classical, figurative works and brought this into territory that was familiar to my
own process.
ST: Arent there a few instances where you intervene with traditional gender roles?
JS: It wasnt very conscious on my part, though my feminist background was probably present. My decisions came out of examining the pose. The arms of the basketball player were reaching up, so we replaced the ball with a drill. There are just as
many female basketball trophies as there are male ones. I realized in my conversations with donors how proud parents were that their girls had participated in these
particular sports. What does this say about our culture when sports stars are predominately male? Or when beauty pageant trophies indicate a certain role for women and
ideas about beauty? My project attempted to update the trophies, to make them
reflect our shared, lived experience today, which is that women can pick up the drill
and men can push the stroller.
ST: What kind of feedback did you get?
JS: I was very moved by the number of donors who attended the opening. Its always a
wonderful occasion to have the project come full circle and to see them acknowledge
the exchange and transformation. I was nervous about their reaction to my alterations
and the removal of the sports references. Thankfully, they really got the piece: they
knew that it honored them but also celebrated others who never received trophies,
including myself. One family had donated several large martial arts trophies earned by
their deceased son, and I was struck by their generosity in the face of loss. Their participation deepened the projects significance for me: I recognized that the trophies werent
just about competition and glorifying the victor; sometimes they can symbolize unfulfilled hopes and dreams.
ST: How do your intentions differ from those of other artists who use everyday objects?
JS: Many contemporary artists use consumer products. However, over the last five
years, I have realized that my work is increasingly less about the materials themselves
and more about a community and a context. No longer are my materials found or
just purchased. Im actively soliciting participants to engage in this social exchange
with me. Its not just finding beauty in the mundane, its finding a connection with
someone. The finished installation brings the individual experience to the collective.
The labor-intensive, transformative process is like alchemy. By soliciting cast-off
materials from communities, the projects reveal how we live, who we are, what we
do. My primary interest is to figure out how to engage with the next community
and how we are going to begin a conversation, a relationship.
Sarah Tanguy is a Contributing Editor for Sculpture based in Washington, DC.
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M a r k e t p l ac e
Idyllwild, CA. Idyllwild Arts Summer Program offers one-week workshops
in sculpture, including Paperplaster Sculpture and Mold-Making (Trudy
Golley); Small Scale Metal Casting (Paul Leathers); Ceramics: Monoprint
and Molds (Arthur Gonzalez); Native American Flutemaking (Marvin Yazzie);
and Metals Week: 6 Workshops. Other courses available in ceramics, painting,
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reviews
Wa k e f i e l d , U. K .
JONTY WILDE
Peter Randall-Page
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
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Gail Wight
Patricia Sweetow Gallery
and Mind Mapwhich suggest a certain otherworldliness. But RandallPage is just as attracted to the formal qualities of a place as he is to its
intellectual possibilities. Indeed, the
formal and intellectual qualities of
his work are fully integrated, as in
Shapes in the Clouds, a series made
from distinctive Rosso Luana marble.
Here, the forms share the geometry
of Platonic solids, yet the stones
extraordinary structure offers a
moment of quiet reverie, as though
we were momentarily able to view
the universe in miniature.
Ina Cole
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JONTY WILDE
forms, although solid and volumetric, are never still; instead, they
appear on the cusp of mutation.
Multiplication by Division demonstrates the importance of the relationship between singularity and
multiplicity, particularly the complex
and mysterious processes behind the
evolution of a unit into a multifarious
mass. Randall-Pages particular brand
of monumentality is achieved
through the creation of these simplified masses, and the work is often
seen in isolation, clearly defined and
not fused into the immediate environment. The sculptures stand digni-
Sculpture 29.3
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TOP: COURTESY PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY / BOTTOM: COURTESY THE WORLD OF LYGIA CLARK CULTURAL ASSOCIATION, RIO DE JANEIRO
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Tony Oursler
Metro Pictures
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TOP: COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JOHANN KNIG, BERLIN / BOTTOM: COURTESY METRO PICTURES, NY
sculpture
Sculpture 29.3
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ous series (including painting, projections on small surfaces, and cutout projections) and incorporating
them into his new constructions.
This diverse collection is less about
the bizarre and more about human
frailty, with several pieces addressing the significance of communication and understanding. Here,
Oursler employs the visual language of popular culture to tackle
desire, addiction, dread, and fragmentation in simulations of cigarettes, cell phones, and lottery
scratch cards.
His signature technique of projecting moving images onto sculptural
pieces continues with the huge
cigarette-maze Marlboro, Camel,
Winston, Parliament, Salem, Marlboro Light, American Spirit (2009).
Devoid of sound and narrative, this
commanding piece, which consumed the entrance gallery in an
arresting vertical forest of smoldering human-sized cigarettes, functions as a silent moviethe viewer
becomes a player on its ingenious
stage. Its taboo subject signifies
addiction and the struggle to quit.
Each stick languidly burns, while an
audio track plays breathing and the
whisper of burning paper. The realistic cigarette columns, branded
with logos, stand as eroding monuments to human vice.
Federal Reserve Note Five Dollars
(2009), a floating eight-foot-long,
five-dollar bill, features an eerily
animated Abe Lincoln who articulates phrases such as a house
divided cannot stand. Despite the
cleverness of this political work,
the audio, which plays a significant
role, could hardly be understood
because of the other sound pieces
in the gallery. This also applied to
Fog or Friends Helping Friends
Saving World with Mirrors (2009) in
which a peep-hole offers a glimpse
inside a miniature house where
actors carry out a melodramatic
pageant focused on phobias and
anxiety.
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Evan Penny, Back of Danny, variation #4, 2008. Silicone, pigment, hair,
Evan Penny
Sperone Westwater
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N e w Yo r k
Charles Ray
Matthew Marks
Top: Charles Ray, Ink Line, 1987. Ink, electric motor, pump, and plastic,
dimensions variable. Above: Charles Ray, Spinning Spot, 1987. Aluminum,
electric motor, and electric components, 24 in. diameter.
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sculpture
Sculpture 29.3
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Thaddeus Mosley
Mattress Factory
Light as Air
Discovery Green
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Above: Susan Robb, Warmth, Giant Black Toobs, 2008. Plastic bags, dimensions variable. From Light as Air. Below: Gareth Lichty, Range, 2007ongoing.
5 miles of hand-woven garden hose.
(1995) to the show. The most humorous work in Light as Air, Footloose
consists of a pair of giant feet with
pointy red shoes and striped socks
(like those worn by the witch in The
Wizard of Oz) designed to stick out
from the side of a building. Kellner
sited the piece next to a small building at the crest of a sloping lawn,
leading to the outdoor performance
stage, a nod to Oleszkos work as a
performance artist. As Kellner
explained, Oleszkohas used inflatables to great benefit to make works
that are very humorous and oftentimes [have] social and political contentShe was the first artist I ever
worked with who did inflatables, and
so, in some ways, this inspired the
idea of doing the whole project. Like
its featured works, Light as Air
addressed political content but with
a sense of humor and wonder on a
grand scale.
Allison Hunter
C a m b r i d g e , O n ta r i o
Gareth Lichty
Cambridge Galleries
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TOP: ANNETTE MESSAGER AND ADAGP / BOTTOM: LAURENT LECAT, ADAGP, COURTESY GALLERY MARIAN GOODMAN, PARIS/NY
sculpture
Annette Messager
The Hayward
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Grard Quenum
October Gallery
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from his ability to draw on the traditions of what was West Africas most
prolific artistic civilizationtraditions
that have now largely disappeared.
But with deep irony, he also manages
to turn the unwanted leftovers of
Western society into accusing images
that point back at their source.
Susan Maude
W e st e r n G a l i l e e , I s r a e l
Bernie Fink
The Open Museum: Omer
Industrial Park
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TOP: JONATHAN GREET, COURTESY MIRIAM SHELL FINE ART, TORONTO, OCTOBER GALLERY, LONDON
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Above: Ping-Yu Pan, Brooding Chaos, 200709. Fabric, wire, and thread,
installation view. Right: Ping-Yu Pan, Chocolate Seashell II, 2009. Fabric, 62
x 36 x 42 cm.
Ta i p e i
Ping-Yu Pan
Taipei Fine Arts Museum
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P E O P L E , P L AC E S , A N D E V E N T S
Vol. 29, No. 3 2010. Sculpture (ISSN 0889-728X) is published monthly, except February and August, by the International Sculpture Center. Editorial office: 1633 Connecticut Ave. NW, 4th floor, Washington, DC
20009. ISC Membership and Subscription office: 19 Fairgrounds Rd., Suite B, Hamilton, NJ 08619, U.S.A. Tel. 609.689.1051. Fax 609.689.1061. E-mail <isc@sculpture.org>.
________ Annual membership dues are US $100;
subscription only, US $55. (For subscriptions or memberships outside the U.S., Canada, and Mexico add US $20, includes airmail delivery.) Permission is required for any reproduction. Sculpture is not responsible for unsolicited material. Please send an SASE with material requiring return. Opinions expressed and validity of information herein are the responsibility of the author, not the ISC. Advertising in Sculpture
is not an indication of endorsement by the ISC, and the ISC disclaims liability for any claims made by advertisers and for images reproduced by advertisers. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send change of address to International Sculpture Center, 19 Fairgrounds Rd., Suite B, Hamilton, NJ 08619, U.S.A. U.S. newsstand distribution by CMG, Inc., 250 W. 55th
Street, New York, NY 10019, U.S.A. Tel. 866.473.4800. Fax 858.677.3235.
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For estimates and project inquiries contact Tracy at ____________________________
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